Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed broadly relates to communications networks and more particularly relates to network monitoring techniques to optimize network performance.
Consider the case when an Atlantic cable becomes unavailable and the traffic from New York City to London must be rerouted via New York City-San Francisco-Hawaii-Tokyo-Singapore-Tel Aviv-Paris-London. After the network outage has been restored, it is not true that the traffic immediately moves back to the preferred route. This is due to several factors:
[1] There is a concern that by moving all the traffic back immediately the nodes may fail in a “fire storm” of activity. The network can be capsized like a ship when all the passengers rush from one side to the other.
[2] Other traffic may have preempted some essential bandwidth before the restoral is attempted and there is not enough capacity to reroute the traffic.
[3] The network may be dealing with other outages and be too busy to attempt the restoral.
Whatever the reasons, it is essential that the network operator be able to monitor the “network health” of the system. The invention disclosed herein does just that.